Archive for the 'Travel' Category

Another work trip, with, of course, a little free time. Not so much this time – work kind of gets in the way sometimes – but i made the best use of what time I had! Unfortunately I got sick, some sinus thing, and also was very busy so had to curtail my diving – but I did get to go once.

I’ll put a few images up front with captions underneath. Click to enlarge. To see them all, browse the gallery below.

The California coast over LA

The island of Oahu, seen at last after hours of empty ocean. Kauai is in the background.

Oahu’s north shore, near “the pipeline” which has such great surf waves.

A surfer on Oahu’s north shore. A few days prior there were record, 40-foot waves, but on this day it was less dramatic.

Beach goers on the north shore. Those waves are something else! The sea is something to be reckoned with here.

At Kaena point, on the northwest corner of the island where the trade winds hit the shore, the scenery is dramatic and, for the foolish, quite deadly.

Near Kaena point, to the north.

Near Kaena point, to the south. This wave was 30 feet tall, but since there’s no perspective, it’s impossible to tell. You can stand there without seeing one of these monsters for a few minutes, and it can sneak up and get you. If you go, pay attention to the rocks; is there water in the holes? If so, watch out.

Look at the water’s color where the sun strikes through this wave.

Kaena point, looking south. This is a fantastic hike, specially if you go at a time with few people. There was almost nobody there when I went, and it was magical. I have visited a few times over the years, and it always delivers.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, whales started leaping out of the water. later they came very close, but it was too dark to photograph. A pod of Dolphins and a monk seal were also present.

This animal, named the humuhumunukunukuapua’a, is the state fish, and yes I can pronounce this!

At the Pearl Harbor visitor’s center, you can see the Missouri at left and the Arizona memorial to the right. I have visited both of these in the past, but not this time.

A Japanese torpedo, found in the mud in the 1990s. It was intact, but after the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) people finished with it, it was damaged, as they had to blow it up.

The USS Bowfin, a highly decorated submarine.

Up periscope!

USS Bowfin submarine

USS Bowfin submarine

USS Bowfin submarine’s engine room

USS Bowfin submarine aft torpedo room

The 5″ deck gun, used to sink many vessels. DO not forget, if you enjoy this kind of thing – as I do – that these vessels represent not only bravery and performance of duty in the face of hardship, but that also they are the instruments of death, used in a grim struggle. War is hell.

The California coast over LA

The island of Oahu, seen at last after hours of empty ocean. Kauai is in the background.

A Japanese torpedo, found in the mud in the 1990s. It was intact, but after the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) people finished with it, it was damaged, as they had to blow it up.

At the Pearl Harbor visitor’s center, you can see the Missouri at left and the Arizona memorial to the right. I have visited both of these in the past, but not this time.

Up periscope!

The USS Bowfin, a highly decorated submarine.

USS Bowfin submarine

USS Bowfin submarine

USS Bowfin submarine’s engine room

USS Bowfin submarine aft torpedo room

The 5″ deck gun, used to sink many vessels. DO not forget, if you enjoy this kind of thing – as I do – that these vessels represent not only bravery and performance of duty in the face of hardship, but that also they are the instruments of death, used in a grim struggle. War is hell.

A Poseidon missile with 14 warhead sockets. Imagine the death this thing could cause; it chilled my blood. Now think of how many of these (or their modern equivalent) still exist.

Waikiki sunset

Oahu’s north shore, near “the pipeline” which has such great surf waves.

Beach goers on the north shore.

A surfer on Oahu’s north shore. A few days prior there were record, 40-foot waves, but on this day it was less dramatic.

Near Kaena point, to the north.

Near Kaena point, to the north. This wave was 30 feet tall, but since there’s no perspective, it’s impossible to tell. You can stand there without seeing one of these monsters for a few minutes, and it can sneak up and get you. If you go, pay attention to the rocks; is there water in the holes? If so, watch out.

At Kaena point, on the northwest corner of the island where the trade winds hit the shore, the scenery is dramatic and, for the foolish, quite deadly.

Look at the water’s color where the sun strikes through this wave.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, whales started leaping out of the water. later they came very close, but it was too dark to photograph. A pod of Dolphins and a monk seal were also present.

Note the specialized nostril lips.

A Green sea turtle off of Hawaii Kai, on the southeast corner.

This guy has a tumor, poor dude.

Often seen, always enjoyed – a yellow moray eel, looking scary.

A yellow moray.

This animal, named the humuhumunukunukuapua’a, is the state fish, and yes I can pronounce this!

Kaena point, looking south. This is a fantastic hike, specially if you go at a time with few people. There was almost nobody there when I went, and it was magical. I have visited a few times over the years, and it always delivers.

On the tail end of a work trip to Hawaii, I tacked on a few days for myself. The goal: scuba diving. There’s a lot of things to do on Oahu, and it’s hard to make a choice, but I focused almost entirely on diving. Still, I have pictures from around the island – it’s so beautiful, I just can’t help myself.

One of the things I love about flying to Hawaii is how no matter what time it is, you can go to the beach, and that’s always what I do. Nothing washes away the combined filth and exhaustion of air travel like the ocean. Here’s some scenes from Waikiki:

On another day I wandered around Kakaako beach park, which has a lot of stray cats (and stray people):

Here’s some random images of the shoreline on the east side:

Here’s one from the north shore, where a 40-knot wind fueled perfect, mach-1 windsurfing:

…and finally, of course, the diving! I was having camera problems, so my color balance and image quality were all messed up.

Here’s the outflow pipes at electric beach, which I dived with new friends Zack, Heather and Daniel.

Clouds of fish in the warm outflow.

From another dive, some crappy pictures of sharks… I was playing with a new camera and didn’t do very well.

Some other reef scenes:

…and a lot of other images you can look through if you are so inclined.

While on a work trip to coastal Oregon, an urgent need arose for me to be in the middle of Vancouver island. I got there about 24 hours later by driving to Portland, Flying to Seattle, and taking a ship to Victoria, then driving to the work site in the hinterlands. Strangely enough, for such a whirlwind trip, I had an oddly relaxed schedule that allowed me to make a few stops and enjoy things along the way. First, the Oregon coast:

On my last day in Alaska for this trip, I drove about as far north from Anchorage as I had south to get to Seward, where I’d hiked near the Exit glacier and kayaked on Aialik bay. My destination this time: the Matanuska glacier. You can see it from the road, once you get within a few miles of it:

Once you get close to it, you can see how huge the thing is. Not only is it long, but it’s high.

The bulk of the glacier dwarves the people walking on it. It’s actually much thicker than it looks here; much of it is hidden under mounds of glacier rubble where it terminates.

Here’s a view of it from above – from later in the day, when I climbed Lion’s head, about a thousand feet over the glacier. I had the mountain all to myself, and sat there for an hour listening to the staggering cracks and books of the glacier.In between these noises, it is completely silent, sometimes for 5 minutes, sometimes for hours. As impressive as this glacier is, it is only a shadow of what it was 100,000 years ago, when it probably rose most of the way up to the mountain tops. I am not a religious person, but it occurred to me that an object like this glacier would make a suitable god. It’s unimaginably vast, powerful, and living on a time scale that I have a hard time comprehending; who knows what secrets lie frozen within it? At one point, I found a dragonfly partially frozen into the ice. Was that a recent event, or a primordial one?

Those lakes in the foreground look like they’re on solid ground, but they’re actually on top of the glacier. The glacier has ground up so much of the surrounding mountains, and has gone through so much melting since the last ice age, that it has a thick layer of rock and dirt on top of it. When you look closely at the lakes, you can see they they’re basically sitting in ice pits. Meanwhile, the soil insulated the ice so much that it has looked like this for a really long time; there is a forest on top of it!

Back to the Glacier’s surface: the top side of it has many water features such as lakes and streams, which carve sinuous gulleys into the ice before vanishing into deep crevasses:

Where water or fracturing has polished the surface, it has that wonderful glacial color:

Larger lakes are also found:

In places where the water is saturated with ground-up stone – not just dust, but really, stone flour – it is gray and opalescent.

Proceeding into the fracture zone, where the ice is splintered and broken by the force of the glacier’s movement, you can find perfectly clear, still pools that are suspended high above the surrounding terrain. note the person at right for scale.

The fractured ice represents much of the surface of the glacier, which winds for 27 miles back into the mountains. It’s extremely rugged and dangerous terrain that can swallow people forever. Caution is advised! Can you find the ice climber in this picture (click to enlarge any of these)?

How about this one?

It’s prudent to wear spikes and carry the right gear for this environment; I hired a guide from Nova expeditions to show me the ropes, but next time I’d probably bring my own spikes and go my own way. I found Nova to be a very good deal – the guide was knowledgeable and competent and the price was reasonable. The helmet, though, is not the height of fashion.

The variety of shapes and textures of the ice seems never ending. And once in a while, an enormous groan or artillery fusillade-sound would come from one or another part of the glacier as it crept inexorably and almost undetectably forward.

Last but not least, the hike up Lion’s Head was a real ass-kicker, but it is totally worth it. It is kind of like climbing a ladder for half an hour, but when you get to the top you can see the glacier as pictured above in the long shot. Here is a view in the other direction; you can see the car down by the road and see exactly what I had to climb to get to this eagle’s view.

The vegetation on Lion’s head is exorbitant and lush. Within a shaded glad under evergreen trees, foot-high ferns resemble their tree protectors.

Just like Arizona, there seems to be an insect for every type of flower.

Miscellany: there is a lodge – the long rifle lodge, that is perched at a spectacular vantage point over the glacier. It is not an expensive or luxurious place, but it has an unrivaled view, specially from the dining room. I would stay there is a heartbeat. the food was simple but good, and I loved staring out the window.

Since my three-day kayaking expedition was cancelled by a big storm, I decided to hike around glaciers instead of row up to them. In a brief moment of sun I had this view of the Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park:

Here is the foot of the glacier. In recent decades it has retreated by about a mile, and at the foot is just a shadow of what it once was. However, it is still huge – several hundred yards across.

This is where the glacier was only in the 1990s. You can see how the rock underneath the ice was scoured away.

Here are some helpful tips; I particularly like the third one.

Now the rain began, but so did the great views. The microclimate of the hillside i was on was incredibly verdant and covered with happy plants. The trail is 3.5 miles long, and rises 1000 feet per mile. This is similar to hikes I’ve made in the grand canyon (although this is much shorter). It is what I call an “ass-kicking” hike.

Running water was everywhere.

Directly across the gorge I could see the naked black rock scoured clean by the glacier in years past, and a small spillover of ice from the ice field. The ice field is an inland sea of ice that sits in an elevated basin; the glaciers are ice falls, analogous to waterfalls. While flowers are blooming below, at altitude on the ice field, it is virtually winter, and cold air flows down with the ice. Hikers here encounter freezing rivers of cold air that can come in hammer blasts.

Now it began to rain in earnest. At first it was just a heavy downpour, but soon it felt as if I were ringed with people playing fire hoses on me. Whenever I climbed over a ridge and was exposed to the cold wind coming off of the glacier and the ice field above, things were pretty uncomfortable. Eventually I reached an overlook where everyone else on the trail was turning back. You can just see the top of the glacier behind me.

I stayed dry for several hours, but eventually I felt a squishing sensation in my shoes and knew something had gone wrong. I spent some time cursing my gear before realizing that i had left the underarm vents open on my jacket, allowing the cold rain to drip down my entire body; I was completely soaked. I kept going.

Soon I crested the top of the mountain and encountered even worse weather. When I took off my rain jacket to put on extra fleece, my t-shirt froze instantly. Visibility soon dropped as well, but i could see the start of the Harding ice field!

Up here (around 3500 feet) there was essentially no vegetation; it looked like what I’d expect to see at 14000 feet down in the states. Now, I was even more soaked, and completely exposed to the so-called catabatic winds (essentially, ice-chilled air) coming off of the ice. There was no shelter, the rain was unrelenting, but I was only half a mile from the end of the trail… I kept on for a while.

Eventually, I felt the beginning of blisters in my water-softened feet, and I realized that mother nature was going to win this time. Reluctantly I turned back. My fingers were so cold I could barely move them; I fumbled and dropped my camera over a ledge. Cursing helplessly, I watched it tumble over and over, entering a waterfall stream, which carried it hundreds of yards down a steep cliff of slippery wet gravel and decomposed shale. It stopped just short of plunging over a cliff ind into the crevasses of the glacier below.

Grumbling, I went down after it. Later I took the picture above of the place where the camera fell. It took me about 30 minutes to make the round trip. Damn. Now, completely cold and annoyed, I headed back to the warmer part of the trail as fast as I could.

Screw you, rain!

Despite the difficulty, it was a great day. I staggered back to the car and sat in the back seat long enough to completely cloud the windows with my breath before changing out of my sopping wet clothes. Relief!

two weeks ago I went kayaking in Aialik bay, in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords national park. I was supposed to go for three days, but a big storm washed those plans away. Still, I was able to go for a single fantastic day. I left from Seward, where I used the services of Miller’s landing, a campground and adventure guide service that rents kayaks and provides water taxi service. They have some backpacker’s “cabins” that are the most reasonable accommodations in the area, at $50/night, although they are basically glorified sheds with beds and heaters – not for those who require amenities of any sort. The Seward region is absolutely beautiful; the town sits on Resurrection bay, which is surrounded by typically gorgeous Alaskan mountains. Otters frolic in the bay and you are guaranteed to see a least one if you spend 15 minutes walking by the water.

All of the water in this region has a spectacular color caused by the particulates from glacial streams. When the sun hits it, it is an incredible aqua color.

The real fun began early in the AM the next day, when we boarded the water taxi for Aialik bay. On the way out, we passed small, rugged islands where sea lions lounged, and where a humpback whale appeared to be scratching itself on rocks – something I’ve never seen before. Here you can see a fin sticking out of the water between the rocks:

Otters were everywhere, and occasionally, seals would surface and observe me; some Dall’s porpoises were playing in the bow wave of the water taxi that ferries kayaks out to the bay from Seward. It rained constantly and the approaching storm made it heavily overcast; the temperature was in the 50s.

We got close to the Aialik and Pederson glaciers; at Pederson we saw an apartment-sized portion of glacier calving into the bay. I didn’t get it on camera, but with a fusillade of thundering cracks it fell off of the glacier, found its buoyancy and rose to twice the height of the glacier’s top, and then disintegrated and collapsed into the water, causing the millions of fragments of floating ice already in the bay to engage in a grumbling commentary as they rubbed against each other.

For miles in front of a glacier, there is a sea of scattered ice debris.

The glacier itsefl – this one is Aialik – is an imposing wall whose scale is difficult to represent because of a lack of objects for comparison. I’d say it’s about 200 feet tall and 3/4 mile wide. It constantly creaks, cracks, and groans, and every 10 minutes or so, there is a shower of ice that sloughs off and splashes into the water.

Here are some images from the last time I was in Alaska. It was last year – I guess I’m a bit behind… this was in the winter, and it’s now the height of summer and I’m in Anchorage and Seward having different adventures! But here’s the pictures anyway.

A brief description of the pictures: The Chugach mountains around Anchorage; the stunning cook inlet scenery; dog sledding in Alyeska; winter survival training; the large animal shelter near Portage glacier; show shoeing along the portage glacier lake. The desert images were taken upon the day I returned to Flagstaff via Phoenix; the highway to Flagstaff was closed due to snow, but down in Phoenix the desert was blooming!

The following is a visual representation of why the effort of hauling my gear thousands of miles, fighting through sometimes difficult water and camping in the cold is worth the effort. I’ve just returned from the area near Tofino, British Columbia, where I was fortunate enough to go kayak camping for a few days.

Sea lions off of Blunden island.

A gray whale and her calf surface briefly.

A sea otter takes a break from his ceaseless activity to watch me. They seem to like he turbulent, foamy water, or at least the food they find there.

Dramatic waves, having traveled immense distances across the open Pacific, come ashore at last.

Whales are huge, but not always obvious. There is a whale in this picture… (click to enlarge, as with all these images)

Only when they break the surface or breathe do you really see them, unless they’re doing something dramatic like broaching or fluking, which I didn’t see this time (although I have seen it – see here).

In the calmer waters behind the barrier islands, it’s a different world.

This is the kind of scenery with which I was continually forced to cope… really, how does one deal with this? It’s everywhere you look; it’s there when the sun sets, and still there in the morning. I couldn’t stop feeling like the luckiest person alive.

Wolves comb the beaches for anything edible. They approached me at close range while I was camping and I had to shoo them away, but unfortunately I didn’t have a camera nearby at the time. They seemed sleek and well-nourished. Here are images of some other wolves I saw once.

I like blue.

This next image, although not that impressive, I will never forget, because it was so hard to get. A 30-knot headwind was blasting mercilessly into my teeth as the tidal current ran against me over a complex bottom, causing confused, turbulent water that pulled in multiple directions with waves popping up unexpectedly to douse me and my unprotected camera. I had to row forward furiously just to go backwards slowly, but I was determined to get an image of these guys. When I put down the paddle for just 8 seconds (I counted), the wind swung me in the opposite direction. The motion of the boat, the lack of good light, and the qualities of the camera made it extremely difficult to get a clear image, all while trying to keep right side up and the camera dry. I took it as a personal challenge to get any image at all, and after all that, when I reached the right spot to take the picture and raised the camera during the 8-second interval, the eagles turned their backs upon me! I shouted “really? That’s the way it’s going to be?” Yes, that’s the way it was.

Many thanks to Blake at Batstar adventure tours, who rented me gear when nobody else seemed interested and was otherwise enormously helpful.